


all those shadows almost killed your light

by weasleytook



Category: Zombieland (2009)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Mommy Issues, Pre-Canon, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-02 02:21:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2796167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weasleytook/pseuds/weasleytook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wasn't born cynical, she was made that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all those shadows almost killed your light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [belligerentReverie (Gallyrat)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gallyrat/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide to you! Hope you enjoy!
> 
> Thanks to my beta for EVERYTHING.

She’s not Wichita then. She’s just Krista. Krista Jean Hunter, age seven. That’s how she signs all her drawings.

It’s just her and her parents in their tiny yellow house in Kansas. It’s safety. It’s home. It’s family.

She doesn’t know any better back then. Doesn’t realize that her mom doesn’t sing her to sleep or hold her the way that other kids’ moms do. Doesn’t understand that her dad drinks too much.

This is all she knows of family and it’s enough.

 

*

 

“You’re going to be a big sister, Krissy. So what do you think about that?” Her dad says just a month before her eighth birthday.

Her face scrunches up in confusion as she looks from one parent to another. Dad is beaming, a smile from ear to ear, but her mom is expressionless and staring off into the distance.

“Do I still get a birthday present?”

He laughs, this big booming laugh that will always remind her of his best days and scoops her up into a hug. “Of course you do.”

“Then I’m okay with it.”

“Good, because she or he is going to need a big sister like you.”

None of them realize how true that statement is going to turn out to be.

 

*

 

Her mom leaves when Samantha, not Little Rock yet, is barely ten months old and Krista is nine. There are no goodbyes. She comes home from school one day and her dad is there with Sam, but no mom to be found.

The only explanation her dad has is, “Mom had to go away.”

“When will she be back?”

“I don’t know,” is what he says, but it sounds just like ‘never’ to her.

 

*

 

They move to Arkansas a few months later because it’s closer to her dad’s side of the family. Her dad works a lot now that he’s the only income they can rely on. Krista and Sam spend a lot of time with their grandma and it makes her understand why her mom had to go. Gran acts like other kids’ moms. She loves them no matter what, she’s happy to see them and she’s always there. Even when their mom was in the house, she was never really there.

Maybe her mom just didn’t want to be a mom. Her dad never really explains, not even as she gets older. They hear from her three times a year, cards for her and Sam’s birthdays and a card for Christmas. No phone calls or visits or anything more than a little bit of cash and a card signed Julie instead of Mom.

It makes sense, she was barely a mother to them when she was around and she’s certainly not their mother now.

Adults think it’s cute to ask her if she’s taking care of her little sister and protecting her. Of course she is. She knows if she doesn’t, no one else will.

 

*

 

Krista is there for everything, all of Sam’s firsts, and she’s the one that teaches her how to ride a bike and to tie her shoes. Their dad tries his best, but he works too much and drinks too much when he’s not working.

Their Gran passes away when Krista is fourteen and Sam is six. Krista overhears some idiot relative saying to her dad at the funeral that for the girls it must be like losing their mother all over again.

It’s not. It’s completely different. Krista is now sure her mother never loved them or wanted them. Gran loved them deeply. Gran didn’t want to go, but her mom never wanted to be there in the first place.

 

*

 

Things get good for a while. Their dad stops drinking and uses the little bit of insurance money from his mother’s estate to take the girls out west on vacation.

Krista is fifteen and Sam is seven when they see the ocean for the first time.

They go to Pacific Playland which maybe isn’t the greatest theme park in the world, but to them it is everything. It’s the day in their lives that Krista can always point to as being completely perfect. For just one day, none of the bad things that have happened matter, because they have this and always will.

At the end of a long and exhausting day, Krista curls up beside her sister in the hotel bed thinking she’s already asleep. But Sam’s eyes open and she smiles brightly at her. “Best. Day. Ever.”

“Yeah, the best.”

Sam grabs her hand and says through her yawn, “I miss Gran.”

“Me too.”

“I miss _her_ too.”

Krista frowns and answers, “Don’t say that, Sammi. You didn’t even know her.”

“I know, but I just do.”

Krista sighs and kisses Sam on the forehead. She understands what Sam is saying, because she was the same way just a few years ago. Sam misses the idea of a mother, not their actual mother. But they don’t get a mother. They had Gran. And they have Dad sometimes. And it has to be enough.

“Hey, we don’t need her. We have us. You’ll always have me, no matter what, got it?”

“Got it.”

Krista pulls her closer and now it’s her turn to yawn. Just as she closes her eyes to sleep she says, “You and me, Sam.”

 

*

 

Krista commits her first real crime when she’s sixteen and Sam is two days away from being eight. Their dad is drinking again and he blows most of his paycheck on that particular habit. She doesn’t want her sister to go without a present or a birthday cake so she teaches herself how to pickpocket rich shoppers in downtown Little Rock.

She’d feel bad about if they didn’t have so much and she had so little.

Sure, taking a couple hundred bucks off of people wearing shoes that cost more than her dad’s car is wrong. But she stops caring about it when she sees Sam ride her new bike around the neighborhood for the first time.

 

*

 

That’s how it goes for a while. Krista leaves pickpocketing for pulling more elaborate and lucrative cons, and she’s a natural at it. Picking the mark, running the con, and never getting caught, it’s comes as naturally as breathing does.

She wonders if she got that from her mother. After all, she had conned herself and everyone else into thinking she wanted a husband and children for a long time.

Krista is barely eighteen and Sam is ten when the police come to their door after midnight. She thinks she’s being busted, but it’s far worse than that.

Too drunk to drive. Car wrapped around a pole somewhere. Their father and the only family they have left, dead at forty-four years old.

Ask her now and Krista wouldn’t be able to tell you how she reacted, or even how she delivered the news to Sam. All she can remember is holding on to her sister and repeating her promise from that night in California, “You and me, Sam.”

 

*

 

“So are you sure this is going to work?”

“Absolutely. If you only learn one thing from me, it should be that boys are dumb.”

“All boys?”

Krista checks her lipstick in the car’s mirror and grins at her sister. “All the ones I’ve ever known.”

She gets out of the car but looks back to make sure Sam isn’t backing out. Sam looks nervous and says, “Are you sure this is okay?”

“Of course it’s not okay. But it’s what we have to do. I don’t want you living in that foster home anymore, and we need money if we’re going to move to California, so are you with me or not?”

“I’m with you.”

Sam is eleven when she commits her first criminal act. Krista feels the tiniest pang of guilt for bringing her sister she’s sworn to protect into this life with her, but it’s the only solution. With no relatives willing or able to take her in, and the courts deciding that Krista was too young and unstable to be Sam’s guardian, she’s stuck in the foster system. At least until Krista can get enough money to take her out of there and to California, the only place they were ever happy.

 

*

 

The quote gets it all wrong. The world actually does end with a bang and not a whimper. The bang, in Krista’s case, comes from the neighbor in the apartment next door and her shotgun. She could not have predicted that her seventy-three year old neighbor Mrs. Wilson would be packing heat, but when she sees who – or what – the older woman has shot, she’s grateful. It definitely used to be a person, but it doesn’t quite look human anymore.

Mrs. Wilson makes her tea and serves it with butter cookies while they watch the news reports come in.

Zombies. Goddamn zombies. That was one she could never have predicted.

“Mrs. Wilson, I – I have to go. My sister is going to need me.”

“Of course, dear. Just take one of these with you.”

She stands and opens an antique cabinet in the corner of the room filled with several types of firearms. Krista has never even held a gun, but if ever there was a time to start, this is it.

Her rescue mission is easier than she expected. Her sister’s foster parents have already been turned, but after a quick shooting lesson with Mrs. Wilson, Krista’s able to take them out pretty easy.

What worries her the most is that Sam is nowhere to be found, and then she remembers, the one place in their old house she could always find her. Krista goes to the coat closet and when she opens it, she’s greeted with a baseball bat that she has to jump back to dodge.

“Sammi! What the hell?”

“Oh my God, Kris? I’m sorry – I thought you were one of –“

Sam drops the bat and jumps up to hug her tighter than ever. Krista hugs her back and says, 

“I’m pretty sure those things can’t open doors, at least not that I’ve seen.”

“I didn’t know. I was just so worried that you wouldn’t –“

Krista steps back and wipes the tears off of Sam’s cheeks. “Hey, what did I promise you?”

“I know.”

“Good. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

It’s not at all how she planned to get her sister out of the foster system, but at least they’re together now.

 

*

 

All of the money she had saved up is pretty much worthless now. It’s all about survival skills, and Krista’s greatest skill is her ability to fool anyone.

So that’s how they survive. A double act conning their way into food, weapons, a place to sleep and transportation all over Arkansas and then to Texas. They don’t bother to care about anyone but themselves, which isn’t all that odd in this new world, most people don’t care about anyone but themselves. Really, when she thinks about it, it’s not that different from the world she knew before Zombieland, the only difference is people pretended to care about others.

Her only goal is keeping Sam alive and getting to Pacific Playland, and she doesn’t give a shit what she has to do to get there.

Then they meet Columbus and Tallahassee. And suddenly she is Wichita and Sam is Little Rock and things are different. They aren’t like other marks, and not just because they were dumb enough to get conned by them multiple times, but it just doesn’t feel the same.

Wichita and Little Rock leave them. But they follow. They don’t run in the other direction and they don’t let the girls down. This isn’t what they’re used to. Everyone leaves and everyone breaks their hearts. But not Columbus and Tallahassee.

They stick around, so Krista and Sam decide to stick right back.

 

*

 

“Status report?”

Little Rock settles on the couch next to her, where Wichita has been sitting re-lacing her boots, and starts rattling it off, “Columbus, asleep and drooling. Tallahassee, asleep and mumbling something about NASCAR. Perimeter looks clear. Ammunition supplies are good, but we will need to do a food run in a few days.”

It’s become their routine. Wichita tends to stay awake longer than anyone else, even before Z-land her mind ran in too circles too much to give her a perfectly peaceful night of sleep. So her and Little Rock take turns giving status reports.

“Good. And what’s your status, Sammi?”

They only use their real names when the others aren’t around. Even though they’ve been a group for six months, everyone still goes by their city names, out of habit more than anything else.

“I’m okay. Tallahassee started teaching me how to play the banjo today.”

Wichita smirks and says, “What a useful skill to have during the apocalypse.”

“It’s just something to fill the time.”

Wichita puts her arm around Little Rock’s shoulder with a smile. “I know, I’m only kidding.”

They’re quiet for a few minutes until Wichita speaks again, “Hey, we’re doing okay, aren’t we?”

Little Rock nods enthusiastically. “Yeah, I think we are.”

“We’re together, like I promised. We made it to California, just like I promised.”

“And we have a family.”

Wichita knows exactly what she means by that. It’s not just the two of them anymore, they have Columbus and Tallahassee and neither of them are going anywhere.

Little Rock kicks off her shoes before asking, “Do you think we’ll live in Bill Murray’s house forever?”

“Maybe.”

Safety is always a shaky concept in Zombieland, but this is as close as it gets. But, family, she has that. And, home is whereever that family is.

It really is enough.


End file.
